CAPTAIN RICHARD DUDLEY
Richard Dudley, born in 1635, was, says Alexander Smith, "a gentleman of old descent in Northamptonshire." His father, a man of considerable estate in that shire of squires, spires, pride, and poverty, was ruined in the war between King and Parliament, and his son Robert was glad to accept the help that Charles the Second gave him, in presenting him with a commission in a foot regiment that was presently ordered to Tangier. It was a poor return for the loyalty in which his father was brought so low.
Captain Dudley soon earned the reputation of a martinet with his regiment; and perhaps something over and above that, if the story of his horrible treatment of a soldier on parade be true. It seems that one of the men stood a little in advance of his comrades as they were drawn up on the parade-ground, and this annoyed our Captain, who desired a sergeant to knock him down. The sergeant was not so violent about it as Dudley wished, and, in a fury he exclaimed, "When I command you to knock a man down, knock him down thus." Suiting the action to the word, he snatched the sergeant's halberd, and, striking the man on the head with it, cleft his skull in two; "of which," adds Smith, rather unnecessarily, "he immediately died."
We are not surprised, after this, to learn that Dudley's military career was not successful, and that it shortly came to an end. Returning to England, his unbridled extravagance left him no choice but to work or take to the road; and what gentleman of the merry and inglorious reign of Charles the Second would hesitate a moment in such a pass, before choosing the road as the better and more gentlemanly way? Work! Perish the thought!
CAPTAIN DUDLEY ON HOUNSLOW HEATH.
So he resorted to Hounslow Heath, where he robbed the Duke of Monmouth, and was captured in so doing and was conveyed to the prison then called the Poultry Compter, from which mansion of sorrow and tribulation he broke out; and, resuming the road, met the Earl of Rochester coming from his seat at Woodstock, accompanied by his chaplain, two footmen, and a groom. The association of the riotous Earl of Rochester, the wittiest and most dissolute nobleman of the age, with a chaplain is a distinctly humorous touch. Dudley robbed my lord of a hundred guineas. What the footman and the groom—to say nothing of the chaplain—were doing while he committed the robbery, we do not learn. They appear, for all we know to the contrary, to have looked on. But the chaplain, at any rate, improved the occasion by soundly rating him. "I don't think I commit any sin in robbing a person of quality," said Dudley, "because I keep generally pretty close to the text, 'Feed the hungry, and send the rich empty away.'" To which Captain Alexander Smith, Dudley's biographer, adds, "This was pretty true in the main, for whenever he had got any considerable booty from great people, he would very generously extend his charity to such whom he really knew to be poor."